The Alternative Number Ones: New Order’s “Regret”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

It's a miracle that New Order ever existed. This was a band formed out of grief and tragedy. The three surviving members of Joy Division were suddenly without their generational frontman, who took his own life just as the band was gathering steam. Instead of that guy, they had to make do with guitarist Bernard Sumner, whose lyrics felt like place-holders and who always seemed faintly embarrassed to be singing. This band should not have worked, but they went on to exceed Joy Division at pretty much every level and to change the sound of left-of-center music for generations. That's miracles on top of miracles. That's pretty good.

In their first decade as a band, New Order figured out how to take stark and meditative post-punk to the club -- to fuse the joyous mechanics of synth-based dance music with the dour expressiveness of the stuff that they grew up making. They released anthem after anthem. They became pop stars in the UK, and they basically defined alternative music in the US when "alternative" first became a Billboard-recognized radio format. (1989's Monsters Of Alternative Rock tour, an important Lollapalooza precursor with an on-the-nose name, had New Order headlining over Public Image Ltd., Throwing Muses, and the Sugarcubes.) They accomplished a lot, and then they effectively broke up.